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Montreal Canadiens netminder Jakub Dobes allows a goal against the Buffalo Sabres in Game 6 of their second-round playoff series in Montreal on Saturday.Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
One of the guiding principles of modern sports psychology is that losing is good for you. How many times have you heard some coach or pro talking after a gutting defeat about how much they’ve learned from having their heads forcibly removed from their bodies and handed back wrapped?
The Montreal Canadiens have put a scientific spin on this idea with their ‘bounce forward’ philosophy. Like the defenders of Stalingrad, the Canadiens never go in reverse.
This idea was pushed to the fore on Saturday night after the Habs were beaten senseless by the Buffalo Sabres, 8-3. A series they had in the bag is now out of the bag and running around the room, knocking over furniture.
“I just feel bounce back, you come back to where you were,” Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis explained afterward. “Bounce forward, you’re actually further than where you were. Physics.”
Clearly, hockey’s gain is space exploration’s loss.
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Like a lot of folk wisdom in sports, this whole line of thinking is nonsense. Losing happens. That includes losing miserably, as the Canadiens just did. But it’s not a good thing. You don’t build on it.
When you’re six years old playing T-ball, failure builds character. When you’re a grown adult pooching things in a highly competitive workplace, HR hits you with a performance-improvement plan. All the Canadiens have just learned is that bad penalties are more powerful than self-help koans.
Had this series ended on Saturday with a Montreal win, both teams could have claimed a sort of victory. They’re both young, but the Sabres are more inexperienced.
Buffalo hadn’t been to the playoffs in (/flipping through notes) 140 years. They’d manhandled the most perpetually grizzled team in the league, the Boston Bruins, in the first round. For Buffalo, this would have been a measured win.
For the Canadiens, rebuilt and ready to party, a Game 6 win would have played like a hometown announcement – stop making vacation plans in June. You’ll be busy. Instead, the entire Canadiens rejuvenation story is in danger of bouncing back. Way back.
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Ivan Demidov, left, Nick Suzuki, centre, and head coach Martin St. Louis watch the final minutes of play against the Buffalo Sabres during Game 6.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Numerology plays into this as well. The Canadiens are on a weird, binary streak. They haven’t lost two in a row since mid-March. That’s 29 games. It’s unusual to the point of statistical improbability. Imagine the psychological impact of blowing two straight now?
Coaches like St. Louis use grade-school philosophy because the players believe in it, but also because it dampens their tendency to fall back on the supernatural. Pros see signs and portents everywhere.
Losing two in a row for the first time in ages, including a game they led 3-1 at home, will have a transformative effect on the Canadiens, all right. This is how they become the Toronto Maple Leafs.
It’s rare that you see a team deciding how it’s next four, five years are going to go in real time. The Canadiens are doing it now.
Up until this point, the year has been a morning stroll for them. Nobody thought they were a championship threat, but they had championship calibre. These are the best seasons for any franchise – filled with hope, minus expectation. A ‘just try your best, we love you either way’ year.
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Next year won’t be like that. It’s going to be much harder. The Canadiens have 48 hours to figure out if that’s going to be fun hard or hard hard.
If they win Game 7, the temperature in Montreal jumps 10 degrees (literally – summer shows up on Monday). Now they’re the team of destiny. They managed to jump out of their own dug grave. As long as they’re not swept by Carolina, Montreal goes into next year a road-tested Stanley Cup favourite.
But if they lose, watch out. Now they are the team that dropped the ball as they were breakdancing over the goal line. Now people start looking around the roster for the weak points. What about Jakub Dobes? Is he a stop sign or a merge or what? What about Mr. Saturday Night (a.k.a. Mr. Sunday Morning) Cole Caufield? Four goals in 13 playoff games does not exactly scream Guy Lafleur reincarnated.
Good vibes also obey physical laws. When they are thwarted, they don’t dissipate. They are transformed into something else. If the transformation is abrupt and hugely disappointing, they become bad vibes.
It’ll be one thing to lose again in overtime on a bad bounce. But God help the Canadiens if they get their wheels removed again.
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At that point, everyone will switch from believing this roster is ascendant to ‘Should we be doing a controlled demolition?’ Not getting rid of everyone. Just the malcontents and malingerers. Then Montreal gets to spend the summer figuring out who’s who. Nothing builds team character like an old timey, Canadian hockey witch hunt.
So yeah, big game.
One bit of sports wisdom that’s always true is that winners find ways to win. That’s how you tell the good teams from the ones that aren’t. Everything else is just jabber.
Clearly, both these teams are rattled. Montreal’s second-period collapse in Game 6 was the mirror image of Buffalo’s cave-in during the same frame in Game 5. That would suggest that neither of these clubs is quite ready for prime time, yet.
Still, one of them is coming out of Monday night feeling like they’re on the cusp of greatness. You can travel a long way on that sort of emotional fuel. The other one will feel like they blew it (because they will have).
Buffalo’s self-image can probably shake off that sort of loss. But Montreal? That’s a dodgier proposition, the results of which cannot be known for a long time. In the interim, the rot of doubt will begin to take hold.
